SENIOR COASTAL MODELLER

Company Description HAEDES is an engineering and scientific consultancy that approaches coastal and natural water challenges with systems thinking, creativity, and strong technical expertise. The team is passionate about exploring new methods, questioning existing standards and codes, and designing innovative, practical solutions for water environments. HAEDES values out-of-the-box thinking and collaboration across disciplines to address complex coastal and hydraulic issues. Joining HAEDES means contributing to meaningful projects that impact natural waters while working in a culture that encourages curiosity and bold ideas.

Role Description The Senior Coastal Modeller is a full-time, hybrid role based in Lisbon or Porto, with flexibility for partial work from home. This role focuses on setting up, calibrating, and validating numerical coastal and hydraulic models to analyze waves, currents, sediment transport, and coastal morphology. Day-to-day tasks include designing and running model scenarios, interpreting results, preparing technical reports, and providing clear recommendations to clients and project teams. The senior modeller collaborates closely with engineers and scientists, contributes to project planning, and mentors junior staff in modelling methods and tools. The role also involves engaging with stakeholders, supporting proposal development, and helping shape innovative approaches to coastal and marine projects.

Qualifications

• Over 10 years of expertise in numerical coastal and hydraulic modelling (e.g., wave, circulation, sediment transport, and morphology models).
• Solid background in coastal engineering, oceanography, or a related field, supported by a relevant master’s degree or PhD.
• Set up, calibrate, validate and interpret numerical models for wave propagation, hydrodynamics, wave-current interaction, sediment transport and coastal morphodynamics.
• Assess shoreline evolution, erosion, flooding and climate-change vulnerability across historic, present-day and future scenarios.
• Evaluate coastal interventions, dredging strategies, maritime works, navigation conditions and nature-based or hybrid resilience measures.
• Design modelling strategies that combine fit-for-purpose complexity, transparent assumptions, uncertainty analysis and field or monitoring data.
• Process and analyse oceanographic, sedimentological, bathymetric and geospatial datasets; identify data gaps and define proportionate acquisition needs.
• Translate technical results into clear recommendations, visualisations and reports for clients, authorities, partners and non-specialist stakeholders.
• Lead technical work packages, review modelling by others, contribute to proposals and help develop younger colleagues.
• Help expand HAEDES’ coastal resilience practice in Portugal and internationally through trusted collaboration and original thinking.

Additional experience we value

• Storm-impact, tsunami or ship-generated-wave modelling, including XBeach-G or related tools.
• Climate adaptation pathways, cost-benefit comparisons and long-term coastal-change assessments.
• Nature-based solutions, living breakwaters, seagrass or aquaculture interactions, and other biophysical coastal processes.
• GIS, data analytics, Python and reproducible workflows; familiarity with SPH or flexible-mesh modelling is an advantage.
• Field campaign design, sedimentological interpretation, environmental impact assessment or collaboration with universities and research institutes.